Cati CreACtive https://caticreative.wordpress.com
Creative Recycling Art & CraftThu, 17 Aug 2017 09:46:24 +0000it-IThourly1http://wordpress.com/https://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngCati CreACtive https://caticreative.wordpress.com
Sustainable lifestyle of our grandmas!https://caticreative.wordpress.com/2017/08/17/sustainable-lifestyle-of-our-grandmas/
https://caticreative.wordpress.com/2017/08/17/sustainable-lifestyle-of-our-grandmas/#respondThu, 17 Aug 2017 09:46:21 +0000http://caticreative.wordpress.com/?p=1182More Sustainable lifestyle of our grandmas!]]>Every summer I come back home, in Italy, where my family still keeps the same way of life of my grandparents. Everyone has a kitchen garden and we harvest it and organise the different ways to preserve food for winter. We make tomato sause, tomatoes in jars and dry, we make jam and fruit under syrup, we eat lots of vegetables and freeze them, we go out in the morning and decide what to cook in base of what is ready in the garden…

My grandparents are farmers and so were their parents and grandparents. I grew up in a small village in the mountains where life is slow, reality is small and food is genuine.

Each August I help out with the things that my grandma has done every summer since she was small, and that I hope I will always do and teach to my grandchildren as well.

Slow Food, Degrowth, Voluntary Simplicity and all the movements inspiring a simple, sustainable lifestyle are all real here, and they are as old as our countryside and hills.

If you want to learn how to leave a low impact life, just come to visit any family farm in rural Italy and you will simply learn what our wise grandparents have always done! ❤

Today is 2017 Earth Overshoot day! From tomorrow on we have theoretically consumed all the resources available on the planet in a year! Last year it was the 6th August. Think about your footprint and take action!

Today marks Earth Overshoot Day – the day by which the human race will have used more of Earth’s natural resources than the planet can renew in the whole year.

TELEGRAPH.CO.UK

]]>https://caticreative.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/earth-overshoot-day-2017-2nd-august/feed/0catiasquarciaCreative Recycling Project in Haringey, Veolia will fund Cati :)https://caticreative.wordpress.com/2017/07/13/creative-recycling-project-in-haringey-veolia-will-fund-cati/
https://caticreative.wordpress.com/2017/07/13/creative-recycling-project-in-haringey-veolia-will-fund-cati/#respondThu, 13 Jul 2017 12:37:16 +0000http://caticreative.wordpress.com/?p=1165More Creative Recycling Project in Haringey, Veolia will fund Cati :)]]>Hello,
I have just launched my crowd-funding campaign to start my Litter-free and Creative Recycling Project in Haringey!
I need help and participation from all of you residents to help improving practices of recycling and looking after the local community!
Join the project, whether it is by funding it with little or coming along to the sessions!

]]>https://caticreative.wordpress.com/2017/07/13/creative-recycling-project-in-haringey-veolia-will-fund-cati/feed/0catiasquarciaveolia projectCatiCreACtive is part of WeClustrhttps://caticreative.wordpress.com/2017/05/31/caticreactive-is-part-of-weclustr/
https://caticreative.wordpress.com/2017/05/31/caticreactive-is-part-of-weclustr/#respondWed, 31 May 2017 11:06:10 +0000http://caticreative.wordpress.com/?p=1010More CatiCreACtive is part of WeClustr]]>Sylvie from WeClustr, an online community of artists, craft-people and creatives found me and asked me to join her network telling my story.
WeClustr is about stories of people who decide to fight to build their own way and realize the true self, although this means so much efforts against the mainstream labor-market and the conformist lifestyle that wants you as it is useful to the current society, generally compromising what you like for money, career, image or other “selves” that the external world projects and imposes.

“…I think we all have a seed inside of us when we are a child. If you manage to discover the one that is for you, you water it, take care of it, it will flourish; and the flower would be so unique that it wouldn’t look the same as everyone else’s. If you stay true to it, no matter how it turns out, no matter what mistakes you made along the way, at the end of the day, you could say, it was my life and I lived it. Now that I am building up my own path, I take whatever I can find along the way, simply considering whether it is something that allows me to develop further. Money is always secondary. This can be problematic especially when living in a city like London, but I’m happy to live with very little.”

]]>https://caticreative.wordpress.com/2017/05/31/caticreactive-is-part-of-weclustr/feed/0catiasquarciaUntitledWater rights and corporationshttps://caticreative.wordpress.com/2017/05/12/water-rights-and-corporations/
https://caticreative.wordpress.com/2017/05/12/water-rights-and-corporations/#respondFri, 12 May 2017 12:56:05 +0000http://caticreative.wordpress.com/?p=999]]>I was interviewed to help realize this short video on water rights and corporation. Watch and remember how precious water is and how much we still have to do to make this world better! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2AU40Aja2Q

]]>https://caticreative.wordpress.com/2017/05/12/water-rights-and-corporations/feed/0catiasquarciaUntitledYou and I Can Dohttps://caticreative.wordpress.com/2016/05/04/you-and-i-can-do/
https://caticreative.wordpress.com/2016/05/04/you-and-i-can-do/#respondWed, 04 May 2016 09:24:48 +0000http://caticreative.wordpress.com/?p=846More You and I Can Do]]>“One of the questions I hear most frequently is, What can I do?

People often expect me to talk about lifestyle changes, recycling newspapers, or changing light bulbs. These are essential, but they are not nearly enough. We now need to restructure the global economy, and quickly. It means becoming politically active, working for the needed changes.

Saving civilization is not a spectator sport.

Inform yourself, read about the issues. If you want to know what happened to earlier civilizations that found themselves in environmental trouble, read Collapse by Jared Diamond or A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright or The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter. If you found this book useful in helping you think about what to do, share it with others.

Pick an issue that’s meaningful to you, such as tax restructuring, banning inefficient light bulbs, phasing out coal-fired power plants, or working for streets in your community that are pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly, or join a group that is working to stabilize world population.

What could be more exciting and rewarding than getting personally involved in trying to save civilization?

Beyond these rather painless often healthily beneficial lifestyle changes, we can also think about sacrifice. During World War II the military draft asked millions of young men to risk the ultimate sacrifice. But we do not need to sacrifice lives as we battle to save civilization. We are called on only to be politically active and to make lifestyle changes. During the early part of World War II President Roosevelt frequently asked Americans to adjust their lifestyles.

What contributions can we make today, in time, money, or reduced consumption, to help save civilization?

The choice is ours—yours and mine.

We can stay with business as usual and preside over an economy that continues to destroy its natural support systems until it destroys itself, or we can adopt Plan B and be the generation that changes direction, moving the world onto a path of sustained progress.

The choice will be made by our generation, but it will affect life on earth for all generations to come.”

A Change Agent

]]>https://caticreative.wordpress.com/2016/05/04/you-and-i-can-do/feed/0catiasquarciaNew paradigms for new Economicshttps://caticreative.wordpress.com/2016/04/30/new-paradigms-for-new-economics/
https://caticreative.wordpress.com/2016/04/30/new-paradigms-for-new-economics/#respondSat, 30 Apr 2016 09:18:08 +0000http://caticreative.wordpress.com/?p=587More New paradigms for new Economics]]>A sustainable future is not possible unless we change our economic paradigm.
The conception of economics has to go back to the original meaning of “taking care of the house” (in Greek Oikos means house, family).
An economy that focuses just on profit and judges the good or bad with a factor measuring only the richness of a country, the GDP, is far away from the idea of taking care of our own home.

For this reason, to correct the deformation of our modern economy, mainly focused on unlimited growth, profit and trapped within finance dynamics, some people have tried to conceive different “economics”, that include factors that really matter in life.

One example is “The Economics of Happiness”

Not only do we need to start conceiving economics differently, free from the chains of money, debt, banks and growth; we will slowly embrace a new cultural paradigm where economics, biology, spirituality…they are no longer disconnected and specialized.
Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi wrote a book on the epistemology shift that is required to conceive an other kind of economics and a more holistic and systemic understanding of the reality.

“As the twenty-first century unfolds, a new scientific conception is emerging. It is a unified view that integrates, for the first time, life’s biological, cognitive, social, and economic dimensions. At the forefront of contemporary science, the universe is no longer seen as a machine composed of elementary building blocks. We have discovered that the material world, ultimately, is a network of inseparable patterns of relationships; that the planet as a whole is a living, self-regulating system. […] Evolution is no longer seen as a competitive struggle for existence, but rather a cooperative dance in which creativity and constant emergence of novelty are the driving forces. And with the new emphasis on complexity, networks, and patterns of organization, a new science of qualities is slowly emerging.”

Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi

See the presentation of the book.

Considering the problem from a biological point of view, our traditional conceptions of the world, based on the classical model of the selfish human being who naturally tends to fight his mates in order to save his own benefits, is not appropriate anymore. The old principle that humans are wolves to each other needs to be corrected with more modern views of a human being who naturally tends to affiliate, cooperate and help others. Maybe not for pure altruism, but because the benefit of the whole is also the more efficient benefit of the one.

According to some thinkers, economy has a lot to learn from ecology and biology:

“The evolutionary and futurist Elisabet Sathouris describes how in the evolution of complex communities of diverse organisms a ‘maturation point’ is reached when the system realises that “it is cheaper to feed your ‘enemies’ than to kill them” . Having successfully populated six continents and diversified into the mosaic of value systems, worldviews, identities (national, cultural, ethnic, professional, political, etc.) and ways of living that make up humanity, we are now challenged to integrate this precious diversity into a globally and locally collaborative civilisation acting wisely to create conditions conducive to life.

We have now reached a new tipping point where enmities are more expensive in all respects than friendly collaboration; where planetary limits of exploiting nature have been reached. It is high time for us to cross this new tipping point into our global communal maturity – an integration of the economy and ecology we have put into conflict with each other, to evolve an ecosophy.

We have to evolve wise societies characterised by empathy, solidarity and collaboration. Wise cultures are regenerative and protect bio-cultural diversity as a source of wealth and resilience.

By revisiting basic assumptions about economics we can begin to integrate ecology and economy in full reconnection of the interbeing of nature and culture. We need wisdom to re-design an economic system fit for life. Here are some insights that can help us:

The rules of our current economic and monetary system have been designed by people and we can therefore re-design them.

We have to question the role of scarcity, competition, and the maximisation of individual benefit has cornerstones of our competitive economy.

In redesigning economic systems at local, regional and global scale we should pay special attention to how the system incentivises regenerative practices, increases bio-productivity sustainably, restores healthy ecosystem functioning, while nurturing thriving communities.

Modern evolutionary biology transcends and includes Darwinian justifications of competition as ‘human nature’, as it acknowledges that complex patterns of collaboration have enabled the evolution of our species and the continued evolution of consciousness towards planetary awareness.

Our ability to cooperate has shaped who we are in equal and possibly more profound ways than competitive behaviour, hence we need to re-design economic systems to establish a healthy balance between the way competition and collaboration are incentivised in the system.

Rather than maximising isolated parameters or the benefit of a select few, a re-design of our economic system to serve all of humanity and all life will have to optimise the health and resilience of the system as a whole (understanding humanity asnature; and the economy as a sub-system of society and nature in interconnected eco-social systems).

The dominant narrative of separation creates a focus on scarcity, competition and individual advantage, while the emerging narrative of interbeing challenges us to create a win-win-win economy based on the understanding that it is in our enlightened self-interest to unlock shared abundances through collaboration.

Whether our structurally dysfunctional economic system can ever deliver sustainability is being questioned more and more. Not just anti-globalisation activists but people within institutions such as the World Bank, government think tanks, academia and the World Economic Forum are questioning the economic growth paradigm and our current version of capitalism.

“Capitalism, in its current form, no longer fits the world around us […] a global transformation is urgently needed, and it must start with reinstating a global sense of social responsibility.”

Common elements of many proposals to create vibrant green economies that serve people and planet involve converting agriculture to organic production methods, facilitating a renewable energy revolution, promoting circular economy and cradle-to-cradle approaches to re-designing our systems of production and consumption and the importance of life-long learning and continuous retraining of the workforce to include eco-social literacy and practices and skills that allow people to participate in the transition toward a sustainable and regenerative economy and culture.

We need transitions in many fields from technology, agriculture, and energy supported by green economic policies, and we need a deeper systemic transformation of the underlying structures of our dysfunctional economic and monetary systems. Creating a collaborative economy at local, regional and global scale will require a transformation of our systems of governance to increase participation, social justice and civic responsibility. Underlying all these transformative changes in the human presence on Earth is a deeper cultural transformation, a shift in worldview and values.

“Sustainability does not mean zero growth. Rather, a sustainable society would be interested in qualitative development, not physical expansion. It would use material growth as a considered tool, not a perpetual mandate. […] it would begin to discriminate among kinds of growth and purposes for growth. It would ask what the growth is for, and who would benefit, and what it would cost, and how long it would last, and whether the growth could be accommodated by the sources and sinks of the earth.”

All these more or less anti-growth perspectives make important contributions to our rethinking of economics with people and planet in mind, yet they might be over-swinging the pendulum. What we need is a more nuanced understanding of how as living systems mature they shift from an early (juvenile) stage that favours quantitative growth to a later (mature) stage of growing (transforming) qualitatively rather than quantitatively.

“It seems that our key challenge is how to shift from an economic system based on the notion of unlimited growth to one that is both ecologically sustainable and socially just. ‘No growth’ is not the answer. Growth is a central characteristic of all life; a society, or economy, that does not grow will die sooner or later. Growth in nature, however, is not linear and unlimited. While certain parts of organisms, or ecosystems, grow, others decline, releasing and recycling their components which become resources for new growth.”

Fritjof Capra and Hazel Henderson (2013: 4)

In their joint publication on Qualitative Growth, Capra and Henderson argue “we cannot understand the nature of complex systems such as organisms, ecosystems, societies, and economies if we describe them in purely quantitative terms”. Since “qualities arise from processes and patterns of relationships” they need to be mapped rather than measured (ibid: 7). There are close parallels between the difference in how economists and ecologist understand the concepts of growth and development. While economists tend to take a purely quantitative approach, ecologists and biologists know how to differentiate between the qualitative and quantitative aspects of both growth and development.

One example of aberrant quantitative growth in living systems is that of cancer cells which ultimately kill their host. Unlimited quantitative growth is fatal for living systems and economies. Qualitative growth in living organisms, ecosystems and economies, “by contrast, can be sustainable if it involves a dynamic balance between growth, decline, and recycling, and if it also includes development in terms of learning and maturing” (p.9). Capra and Henderson argue:

“Instead of assessing the state of the economy in terms of the crude quantitative measure of GDP, we need to distinguish between ‘good’ growth and ‘bad’ growth and then increase the former at the expense of the latter, so that the natural and human resources tied up in wasteful and unsound production processes can be freed and recycled as resources for efficient and sustainable processes.”

Fritjof Capra and Hazel Henderson (2013: 10)

The distinction between good growth and bad growth can be informed by a deeper socio-ecological understanding of their impact. While bad growth externalizes the social and ecological costs of the degradation of the Earth’s eco-social systems, good growth “is growth of more efficient production processes and services which fully internalise costs that involve renewable energies, zero emissions, continual recycling of natural resources, and restoration of the Earth’s ecosystems” (p.10). Capra and Henderson conclude: “the shift from quantitative to qualitative growth […] can steer countries from environmental destruction to ecological sustainability and from unemployment, poverty, and waste to the creation of meaningful and dignified work”

The call for practices that move beyond simply being sustainable is growing stronger. Being sustainable, or as William McDonough has defined it “100% less bad” is not enough anymore. We have severely degraded ecosystems everywhere to the point that the integrity of the biosphere is compromised the cumulative effects of our actions (see Planetary Boundaries). To create a successful transition within the 21stCentury we need to start thinking in terms of restorative and regenerative practices that contribute to systemic healing and aim to optimize the whole system for all of humanity and all of life.

]]>https://caticreative.wordpress.com/2016/04/30/new-paradigms-for-new-economics/feed/0catiasquarciaSustainable development paradigm for the AnthropoceneFailure of Cap and Trade Emission Systemhttps://caticreative.wordpress.com/2016/04/27/failure-of-cap-and-trade-emission-system/
https://caticreative.wordpress.com/2016/04/27/failure-of-cap-and-trade-emission-system/#respondWed, 27 Apr 2016 14:25:57 +0000http://caticreative.wordpress.com/?p=615]]>Do you know which legal instruments we have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and get businesses to respect targets?

One of them is the Trade Emission System, implemented in Europe as a solution, but resulting in a potential failure, that favors private profit and for sure doesn’t help the environment.

Western cultural paradigms are strongly shaped by science, rationalism and reductionism. We evolved through the ancient dualisms of physics/metaphysics (Plato and Greek philosophy), matter/soul, earth/sky, material/spiritual (Christianity), emotional/rational, physical/mental, internal subject/external object, nature/culture,..
We developed within a dualistic culture, whether we are aware or not of it, that shaped our conception of the world and reality around us. We tend to conceive these categories disconnected or divided and to judge them in terms of right or wrong. Generally, anything that had to do with body, earth, emotions, sins and corruption was considered negative dimension that kept the human being far from the divine condition.

From these roots and through the several scientific revolutions we arrived to the extremes of Positivism and Rationalism in the XIX century that leaded to the sectorialisation of subjects and specialization of expertise.

We can study the human being from many perspectives, but each one brings an understanding of it, which is limited to the very deep expertise of that specific subject.
This is evident in sectors like medicine or biology (to the extent of considering living beings as scientific bodies or “machines”), psychology, with the stigmatization of behaviors through etiquettes and diagnosis. Generally, the subjects that lose the most in our dualisms are the humanities and the arts, considered useless in our profit-orientated society, because not driven by striving motives. Unfortunately, those are the ones that can give hope for the future. The only ones capable to nurture human creativity and insight, the ones that make us human and empathetic and suggest us innovative solutions for problems.

The consequence of scientific reductionism is that every science tends to own a piece of the cake (the cake is the whole human being) and wants to explain the whole cake just from the partial perspective of its single slice. However, no one slice, in its partial view, will have the capacity to understand the whole cake as a holistic totality. It will see the cake divided and it will understand it from its limited perspective. Each slice will have its own flavor, consistency and color, that may have ingredients in common with the other slices, but it won’t give the taste of the whole cake as an integrated well prepared meal.

This paradigm does not work anymore in our complex society. Things are nowadays too complicated to be explained in sectors. Complexity means inter-connectedness and inter-relation. The world is a complex whole-system made of incredible interactions among elements. As someone already said: the whole is much more than the sum of the parts.

In sustainability, it is not possible to understand the biological functioning of ecosystems if we have no idea of the economic world dynamics. We can’t speak about agriculture if we don’t know anything about social and cultural dimensions. We can’t address community development if we don’t consider the complexity of cultural environments and worldviews. All of it is part of the WHOLE SYSTEM. Understanding the system implies considering all the dimensions and aspects as interacting, influencing each other and contributing to evolutionary processes that need to be observed from a “big picture” perspective. Otherwise, we get lost into the limited and partial visions and details, and we’ll lose the orientation towards reasonable and mindful aims.

Sustainability requires a whole-system, transdisciplinary, holistic and integrated approach among all the sources of knowledge. It requires also a deep awareness of all this.